Việt Nam: Current issues

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OVERVIEW:

Museums

Historical background

Sectoral overview

Current issues

In recent years significant improvements have been made in techniques of collection care and display by larger museum institutions in Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City and a number of other major centres of population. Several National Museums have also begun to stage special temporary exhibitions and to develop educational programmes and linkages with schools and community groups.

However, whilst the great majority of regional museums contain interesting and important collections, many provincial and municipal staff lack the technical expertise, materials and equipment to preserve those collections, neither do they yet have the wherewithal or resources to present their artefacts to visitors in a meaningful way.

This situation is compounded by the shortcomings of the Conservation and Museum Studies programme offered by the Hà Nội University of Culture (Trường Đại học Văn hóa Hà Nội), which has neither the text books, equipment or materials to teach contemporary conservation and museum management, and is thus concerned mainly with classroom-taught theory rather than practice.

A further problem is that - as in many other developmental sectors - whilst numerous bilateral and multilateral assistance projects are currently focused on enhancing the technical, curatorial and management skills of regional museums staff and providing them with greater access to the latest conservation technology, those countries providing the assistance are all too often unaware of what other foreign partners are doing in Việt Nam, resulting all too often in duplication rather than co-operation.

Make direct contact with organisations and individuals working in the heritage sector through our KEY CONTACTS database.

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